Richard Reeves: Nation needs rational debate on economy

Tuesday

Sep 30, 2008 at 12:01 AMSep 30, 2008 at 2:42 PM

GRAND FORKS, N.D. — The 43rd president, George W. Bush, added a couple more quotes for historians to consider after he finally gives up the leadership of the country, which is what he seemed to be trying to do last week:

GRAND FORKS, N.D. — The 43rd president, George W. Bush, added a couple more quotes for historians to consider after he finally gives up the leadership of the country, which is what he seemed to be trying to do last week:

1. “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.” The sucker in question, according to The New York Times, is the economy of this United States. The paper was quoting a remark made by our leader during his “contentious” White House meeting last Thursday with congressional leaders and presidential candidates to try to work out a plan to get more money out to (and from) the folks. The argument in Washington seemed to be about whether “folks” means ordinary citizens or bankers and other enemies of the state.

2. “The legislative process is sometimes not very pretty.” This came in his 60-second appearance outside the White House on Friday.

Neither, sir, are you.

This week has been an embarrassment to the Republic and an insult to the public. The fundamental problem, beyond our seven-year Washington-driven descent from superpower to menace, is that Bush has tried to govern by saying that the sky is falling and we have 24 hours to stop it — or this sucker is going down.

It worked in Iraq, which we prevented from invading Long Island, but this replay is worse than farce. It is not only that no one can agree on what is the solution here, no one can agree on the problem. Is the “sucker,” the largest and most productive economy in the history of the world, really going down because of the gambling and greed of a few thousand grossly overpaid men and women on Wall Street? Is the solution for the taxpayers of this great country to give those same people billions of dollars to roll the dice again?

What is wrong with our leaders, beginning at the top? They seemed to agree, a few days ago, that there was a crisis that could only be dealt with by squeezing the victims — and the squeezing had to be done NOW! The secretary of the Treasury, whomever he or she be, was to be given the power of both the president and a battlefield commander. But that could not be done immediately for a variety of reasons, some of them — thank God! — embedded in the Constitution of the United States of America, a document designed to protect leaders from panicking and then panicking the people into unwise solutions.

The delay implanted by the Founding Fathers saved us from the idea of economic czardom. It provided the time for economists to argue among themselves about how great is this greatest of crises — “since the Great Depression,” in the phrase favored early in the week. Some even had the temerity to suggest that the people who made the problem, the money-lenders in the temples along the Hudson River, should be forced to solve it themselves. (That is a position that, right now, seems to be favored by economists and politicians at polar ends of the bipartisan spectrum.)

More important, the Constitution-given delay gave the people of the Republic the time to rise up and to rough up their elected representatives. Polls indicated that most of the citizenry believed there was, if not a falling sky, a real problem. But they did not trust the words or motives of their leaders in Washington — to say nothing of the riverboat gamblers along the Hudson. I have enjoyed watching from well outside the Beltway, far west of the Hudson, the build-up of public anger at the ill-considered panic on the Potomac.

Friday morning, watching my president on television backing away from microphones to avoid questions he can’t answer, I telephoned my editor in Kansas City, Mo., to say that I would be filing this column in an hour or so — “if this sucker doesn’t go down before then.”

“OK,” she said. “Surely the Republic will survive for another hour.”

Surely it will. There is something to be said for a bit of patient and rational debate and the common sense of millions of Americans. We do need some time to debate what is wrong and what needs to be done to fix it.

Richard Reeves is a columnist for Universal Press Syndicate.

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